en almost appalling to me a few years ago, but I suppose
I can live through it now. Maybe it will be well to say what sort of
people these prospective voters are. There are 50,000 of them on the
Pacific coast at large, and 15,000 or 20,000 in San Francisco. They
occupy a quarter just out of the business center of the city. They
worship a hideous idol in a gorgeous temple. They have a theater,
where the orchestra sit on the stage (drinking tea occasionally,)
and deafening the public with a ceaseless din of gongs, cymbals, and
fiddles with two strings, whose harmonies are capable of inflicting
exquisite torture. Their theatrical dresses are much finer and more
costly than those in the Black Crook, and the immorality of their plays
is fully up to the Black Crook standard. Consequently they are ruined
people. Their prominent instinct being just like ours, let us extend the
right-hand of fellowship to them across the sea. Some of the men gamble,
and the standing of the women is not good. The Chinese streets of San
Francisco are crowded with shops and stalls mostly, but there are
many Chinese merchant princes who do business on a large scale. The
remittances of coin to China amount to half a million a month. Chinamen
work hard and with tireless perseverance; other foreigners get out of
work, and labor exchanges must look out for them. Chinamen look out for
themselves, and are never idle a week at a time; they make excellent
cooks, washers, ironers, and house servants; they are never seen drunk;
they are quiet, orderly, and peaceable, by nature; they possess the rare
and probably peculiarly barbarous faculty of minding their own business.
They are as thrifty as Holland Dutch. They permit nothing to go to
waste. When they kill an animal for food, they find use for its hoofs,
hide, bones, entrails--everything. When other people throw away fruit
cans they pick them up, heat them, and secure the melted tin and solder.
They do not scorn refuse rags, paper, and broken glass. They can make
a blooming garden out of a sand-pile, for they seem to know how to
make manure out of everything which other people waste. As I have said
before, they are remarkably quick and intelligent, and they can all
read, write, and cipher. They are of an exceedingly observant and
inquiring disposition. I have been describing the lowest class
of Chinamen. Do not they compare favorably with the mass of other
immigrants? Will they not make good citizens? Are the